Tag: Science
A Reader’s Question About Surviving the Ice Age
An anthropologist describes the multiple ice ages of the Earth’s past and how our species survived the most recent one. This article was originally published at The Conversation…
The Problems of Evolution as a “March of Progress”
The idea that evolution is a hierarchy of complexity with humans on top lurks in everything from biology classes to politics. It’s time to unlearn this false and…
Digging for Birds
My partner and I bought a house in 2019 and moved to San Antonio, TX, in service of my pursuit of a Ph.D. in anthropology. One thing that…
The Collapse of the Canadian University and the Rise of the Church of Covid
February of 2022 was a particularly dark month, both in Quebec and in Canada generally. In Quebec, we had the expansion of the use of “vaccine passports” to…
Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
In 1950, human blood was stored for patient use at a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons In the spring…
Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
An anthropologist dives into the morally fraught blood and plasma industry and what it reveals about human societies—the good, the bad, and the gory. ✽ In the spring…
Big Bend Javelina Survey
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Tree Rings Are Evidence of the Megadrought—and Our Doom
I love trees. I also love dendrochronology—literally, “the study of tree time.” This science, which uses data derived from tree growth rings, provides scientists with a wealth of…
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Epistemologies – The Line Between Bodies and Ideas?
This browser does not support HTML5 audio Listen to an audio recording of this piece read by Nathan Klembara A recent trend in the sciences is the attem…
What Is SAPIENS Magazine?
SAPIENS magazine is an online portal for readers to better understand the world and what it means to be human. AerialPerspective Images/Getty Images WHAT IS SAPIENS MAGAZINE? SAPIENS…
SAPIENS Podcast Season 4 Reflections and Celebrations
In this live event, a panel of archaeologists and podcasters celebrates the completion of SAPIENS Podcast Season 4 and RadioCIAMS’ SAPIENS Talk Back series. Meet the amazing people…
What Do Anthropologists Do?
A person documents a centuries-old Basque carnival in Alsasua, Spain. Many anthropologists investigate cultural phenomena, such as rituals and religious traditions. NurPhoto/Getty Images …
Does Green on COVID-19 Maps Mean What You Think?
Picture a traffic light. This isn’t a trick question. We want you to visualize some sort of box housing three lightbulbs, each behind a colored filter: red on…
At the Limits of Cure for Tuberculosis
As part of a tuberculosis screening, a radiologist in Germany examines a lung X-ray of a refugee from the 2022 Russian war in Ukraine. Matthias Balk/Picture Alliance/Getty Images…
An Ecology of Knowledges: An Interview with Micha Rahder
An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation By Micha Rahder, Independent Scholar 336pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press § Colin Hoag spoke…
Javelinas and Texas Ebony Trees in South Texas
Texas Ebony trees (Ebenopsis ebano) is a species of legume native to South Texas. These trees produce large bean pods (see below) that ripen and fall to the…
How “Wilderness” Was Invented Without Indigenous Peoples
Anthropologist Spencer Greening, a member of the Gitga’at First Nation, maps 2,000-year-old fish traps in an intertidal area as part of his graduate studies in Indigenous resource management…
What a Shipwreck’s Tree Rings Reveal
Tree rings in a cross section of an oak hull plank from the ship Batavia, which sank in 1629, hold clues to the 17th-century timber trade in Europe.…
Fuel Maps: Digitizing Grass and Sensing Fire in Brazil
Guilherme M. Fagundes, Princeton University § Part and parcel of the technological repertoire in wildland fire management, fuel maps invite us to reflect on the everyday life of…
A Window on Humanity’s Turbulent 2021
[no-caption] John Finney Photography/Getty Images Amid forest fires, the storming of the U.S. Capitol, private space flights and more, 2021 saw the pandemic bed in. Each time it…
When Biblically Inspired Pseudoscience and Clickbait Cause Looting
Archaeologist and co-author Morag M. Kersel stands in one of thousands of looters’ pits at the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Bâb adh-Dhrâʿ in Jordan. Yorke M. Rowan…
Does DNA Simplify or Complicate Repatriation Claims?
University of Cape Town archaeologist Simon Hall leads a visit to the farm in Sutherland, South Africa, from which the remains of several individuals were taken a century…